Article/Document:
Connecting the Missing Link: An Interview with Zecharia Sitchin
Sirona Knight and Michael Starwyn
original source | fair use notice
Summary: Zecharia Sitchin has written a series of intriguing books including The 12th Planet, The Wars of Gods and Men, When Time Began, Stairway to Heaven, and The Lost Realms (Bear and Company). These books deal with Earth's and humankind's histories and prehistories and are based on information actually written on clay tablets by the ancient civilizations of the Near East. In a rare interview, we had the opportunity to ask Zecharia Sitchin about his transformational journey which has lead him to the well-researched and documented discovery that our ancestors came from the stars.
Considered the father of alternative archeology, Zecharia Sitchin has a profound knowledge of modern and ancient Hebrew and many other Semitic and European languages. This knowledge has enabled him in his research of such ancient cultures as Sumer, Egypt, and Mesoamerica. One of approximately 200 scholars on the planet who can read and understand ancient Sumerian, Zecharia Sitchin has written a series of intriguing books including The 12th Planet, The Wars of Gods and Men, When Time Began, Stairway to Heaven, and The Lost Realms (Bear and Company). These books deal with Earth's and humankind's histories and prehistories and are based on information actually written on clay tablets by the ancient civilizations of the Near East. Born in Russia, raised in Palestine, educated in England, and a leading journalist and editor in Israel for many years, he now lives in New York. In a rare interview, we had the opportunity to ask Zecharia Sitchin about his transformational journey which has lead him to the well-researched and documented discovery that our ancestors came from the stars.
When and how did your search or quest in what is now termed "alternate archeology" begin?
It began when I was a school boy studying the Old Testament in its original language of Hebrew. Only when you read it in it's original language do you understand what it really says. I was nine or ten years old, and we reached chapter six of Genesis. This chapter describes the beginning of the deluge, the great flood, which includes Noah and the Ark. It begins not with the story of Noah himself and what happened, but with a preamble of some eight verses, that are obvious remnants of a much older and different text than the ensuing story of Noah and the Ark. These eight verses have been the delight of Sunday preachers because they talk about the reasons for the deluge, and why God became angry with humankind. It says that the time just before the great flood was when there were giants upon the Earth who married the daughters of men and had children by them. I raised my hand and said, "Excuse me teacher. Why do you say giants when the word in Hebrew is "nefilim," which means those who have come down or descended, and in the context because it speaks like they were sons of the gods, who came from Heaven to Earth." I was expecting to be complimented for my linguistic acumen, but instead I was reprimanded harshly. The teacher ordered me to sit down, and not to question the Bible. I was not questioning the Bible. On the contrary, I was trying to bring out the need to understand precisely what the Bible says.
It sounds like this search for who the "nefilim" were became your life's work?
It became an obsession with me. What did the bible mean by "nefilim". Later on, when I began my Biblical and archeological studies of the ancient Middle East, I realized another verse among those eight verses is even more explosive because it talks about them as being the sons, plural, of the gods, plural, which is very odd in a Bible totally devoted to monotheism. The search which began when I was a school boy lasted about thirty years, and took me through all the various mythologies of the ancient peoples, back to the first place or civilization that had written records. All so-called later myths have been written down on clay tablets. These were the people called the Sumerians, whose civilization blossomed out about six thousand years ago in what is now-a-days Iraq, and was known as Southern Mesopotamia.
Wasn't it while studying the Sumerian tablets that you discovered the Anunnaki, the Keepers of the Secrets?
Yes, the Sumerians called "those who descended from Heaven to Earth" the "Anunnaki." The term in Sumerian literally means those who from Heaven to Earth came. So starting as a school boy and inquiring about the correct meaning of the word "nefelim" in the Bible, I ended up with the Anunnaki, studying and reporting to my readers, due to my ability to read the Sumerian clay tablets. The tablets said the Anunnaki came from another planet in our own solar system. It's a planet in our own solar system that comes into our vicinity every thirty-six hundred years as a basic mathematical number; sometimes a little less, sometimes a little more. They started to came and go between their planet and our planet about four hundred and fifty thousand years ago. The Anunnaki came here for their own needs and reasons, in search of gold, which they needed to protect the atmosphere of their own planet. This brings up issues such as why were they losing their own atmosphere, and was it a matter of environment. We are facing some of the same issues right now on our own planet. In addition, they needed manpower and workers, so they jumped the gun on evolution, combining their genes with the genes of humanoids. They combined their genes with females already on Earth, and as a result of evolution brought us about. So no wonder all this search for a so-called missing link that connected between Homo-Erectus and Homo-Sapiens has proven fruitless. That link is missing because it was jumped over artificially through genetic engineering.
That link came from another world?
Every planet is a world. The question is where did their planet come from because according to the Sumerian texts, which I take as scientific data, their planet was thrust out of another solar system. So in a way, we are the product of a cosmic connection. As a matter of fact, I can tell you my next book, due in Autumn, 1998 is titled "The Cosmic Connection." We are genetically a combination of the evolution of humanoids on Earth, and of those who came into our solar system on a planet from another solar system. This is an eternal chain. They brought it to us, and we will bring it elsewhere.
I was going to ask you about this concept of the human hybrid. Now it seems like we are at that point in out own evolution where we're mapping out the DNA helix, and starting to do our own genetic engineering. It's almost as if we are taking on where our ancestors, the Anunnaki, left off.
We are exactly on the threshold. It's really interesting, if you come to think about it, all these scientific advances in genetics and space travel are happening almost at the same time. It is if the cycle is going back to our beginnings, and we are on the threshold of going out and doing to another planet, what was done to us.
This accounts for some of the changes and transformations happening in the world today.
Yes, I appreciated the back issues of "Magical Blend." I was reading over and over again the statement of purpose of the magazine because when I read a magazine I don't always go straight to the articles. It says that "Magical Blend" accepts the premise that society is undergoing a fundamental transformation, and a new world view is being born. The magazine intends to deal with where we are going, and how every may or may not have an input in that. This brought to my mind an Arabic folk story. This folk tale dealt with two travelers who were walking from one town to another town. After a while they reached a crossroads and a pole bearing the name of the various cities, with pointers to the left and right. The pole had fallen down. One of the travelers sat and started to cry, saying, "We are lost. Now this directional pole has fallen down, and we don't know where to go, so we are lost." The other travelers said, "Oh no, we are not lost." He took the pole and pointed it towards the town from which they had come. When he did this, all the other directions fell into place. He told the one that was crying, "So you see my friend, in order to know where you are going, you have to know where you came from." And this, I think is the moral of my writings because I really feel a kinship with the past. This is what happened so many thousands and millennia ago. Here is what the Sumerians wrote down, and this what the Anunnaki who came did; they did this and that. They gave this knowledge and that knowledge, the zodiac, etc. The value of this knowledge is that information lies the clue to our future. So while I'm supposedly writing about the past, I'm really erecting the poles with directional signs for the future.
You point out in your books that we are entering a New Age, moving into the Age of Aquarius. Why is this important?
A Sumerian Cylinder seal, over 4500 years old, that depicts an astronaut on Mars, the sixth planet, (counting from the outside of the solar system in), and an astronaut on Earth, with a space ship between them. There is a date on this which is Pisces. That encounter took place during the age of Pisces. The zodiacal cycle returns to exactly the same spot every 25,920 years, so we are now leaving the age of Pisces. Enki was the prototype god of Aquarius. Whether this means that it is all going to happen again, that Enki is coming back, I don't know. There are a lot of signaling and signs that all point in that direction.
The way you correlate temple dates and uses with changing times is intriguing. What were the purposes of the ancient structures such as Stonehenge?
The significance of Stonehenge is it was not the only astronomically oriented megalithic structure at that time. For example, there is a kind of Stonehenge on the Gollan Heights in Israel. The structures are similar and have similar orientations. Around 2200 BC, the conflict arouse about who was supreme on Earth, between Enki and Enlil and their two sons, and they used nuclear weapons. This had to do with the changing of the Age of Taurus into the Age of Aires. The spaceport at the Sinai Peninsula was destroyed and the observatory structures were built. These were not structures for use by the Anunnaki, but to enable humankind to follow the celestial cycle. There were two different kinds of temples, ones that were oriented to the equinoxes, called eternal temples, and ones that are oriented to the solstices. The solstice temples were not eternal because over a period of years, the axis changes and shifts. By measuring this shift, you can tell when the solstice temples were built.
Why do you feel scholars continue to misinterpret the written records?
There are two prime reasons. One reason is we are all captives of our technology. For example, there is a depiction of two eagle-men saluting a rocket on one tablet. A hundred years ago if I were asked what this was showing, I would have said two men saluting a pencil because I would have never heard of a rocket. Some of the Sumerian tablets are so complex they look like computer printouts. It is quite possible that someone will go back to the these texts and say how come Sitchin didn't realize they were talking about this or that. The second reason is that to accept the Sumerian and Biblical data involves the acknowledging the existence of extraterrestrials. There is a text that describes how Enki, leading a group of fifty Anunnaki, splashed down in the waters of the Persian Gulf and waded ashore and established the first base on Earth, and then he assigned tasks to his personnel. Privately, many scholars tell me that I am right, but publicly they have to protect the status quo. Even so, my books are being used in many college and university courses. They are called alternative archeology, so changes are happening.
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